Shift is back. This time with Gujarati minimalism (it’s a thing)

There’s something to be said about pivoting in your career. Gone are the days when we were expected to live in one place, serve one employer, have one holiday a year. Designer Nimish Shah, for one, is familiar with the reset button and the power it holds to close what’s faulting but also open a vast, exciting new world elsewhere.

A graduate of the London College of Fashion, Shah cut his teeth at ateliers like Chloé and Burberry before launching his label Shift in 2011. The ready-to-wear brand became a favourite among the fashion and celebrity crowd for its easy, almost retro silhouettes—languid skirts, shift dresses, and pussy-bow-collar blouses with ditsy prints.

He shuttered the label in 2018, later assuming the creative director mantle at Anand Ahuja and Sonam Kapoor’s ready-to-wear label Bhaane. Now, after an eight-year hiatus, he is bringing Shift back—but not quite as we remember it. The classic poplin dresses can wait. Shah has graduated from boy to man and this time he is reviving Shift with a new brand philosophy that brings together Scandinavian minimalism with his Gujarati roots.

At the centre of this first collection lies the classic lehngo jabho, a loose pyjama and collarless kurta that are the Gujarati man’s idea of a loungewear staple. “I’ve always found this piece beautiful from a sartorial standpoint—the starkness of the white and how inclusive it is across age and demographic. It’s truly humble yet chic,” he says. Along with co-ord sets, there are also trucker jackets, a slew of trousers in cotton voile, and even a mini home collection with a selection of throws and shams, some upcycled from quilt remnants by artisans in West Bengal, others created in mechanical woven jacquard. It’s this curious crossover between hand-made and machine-made that forms the thesis for his brand moving forward.

Ahead, the designer talks about stepping into a new chapter, his love for ‘generic’ design, and his take on desi cotton.

What did summers in Gujarat look like for you, moving between your parents’ home outside Ahmedabad and growing up in a Gujarati household in Mumbai?

I’ve always really liked summer in Gujarat. There’s a certain crispness to it—less traffic, everything feeling fresh, clean, and neat. My early memories are of visiting relatives and noticing the small nuances in how they lived and what they ate. It was extremely hot, often uncomfortably so, but there was always some little reward—nimbu pani, something cold—and a particular way of adapting to the heat that felt very novel to me.

Growing up in a Gujarati household in Mumbai felt more familiar. There’s such a strong Gujaratiness to the city, and I remember that open-door policy vividly—going to naataks (Gujarati dramas), where all the aunties would dress up, and inevitably bumping into relatives.

What are your earliest memories of fashion?

The kora cotton saris that Gujarati women used to wear. These are stiffer saris, nicely starched—they aren’t like those beautiful silky saris. And they’d wear them with the Gujarati drape, which was just beautiful. Men would wear these crisp organdy kurtas, stiffly ironed—it was like wearing paper. But there was such pride in them, and nobody would complain about the practicality, or how they crease, or the maintenance they required. Everybody participated. Men would iron their own kurtas and ensure there wouldn’t be a spot or stain. It would always be an immaculate Ujala white. And economic status didn’t tie into the way you dressed; you could come from a humble background, but there was always an emphasis on looking sharp and presentable.

Why did menswear feel like the right entry point for this new chapter of Shift?

I don’t think I’ve ever stopped thinking about making clothes. Maybe I oscillate between fashion and clothing, but I’ve always, always thought about clothes—on people, on myself, generally in life. I feel now is a good time, because I’m much more confident in the belief of how Shift started, how it is still relevant, how it still has a place, and how it can sustain. I chose to launch with menswear from a very practical standpoint. I’ve really enjoyed making men’s clothes—they’re more linear. So much about it is the fundamental building blocks of a wardrobe.

For this collection you’ve worked extensively with desi cotton or Gossypium arboreum. What fascinated you about the textile and its history?

Desi cotton, or Gossypium arboreum, came through my research and through conversations about how cotton as a crop was, in many ways, supplied to the world by India and continues to be one of our major exports. It’s something that is special to our terrain and has been mastered over generations.

What fascinates me is how region-specific it is—who produces it, how it’s produced, and how that material continues to evolve. Even today, mills are producing new varieties of cotton and cotton blends and constantly innovating.

Your family has a printing factory in Gujarat, so you’ve experienced that relationship between craft and manufacturing firsthand. Has that proximity changed the way you think about what constitutes ‘craft’?

In our own practice at the factory we have relationships with craft communities, so it’s always been a combination of the semi-hand and the semi-machine. For me, the human hand—or the human connection—is more important than the distinction between skilled labour and what we conventionally call craft. That has influenced me all along, but it has also shown me that these categories aren’t as clear-cut as we make them out to be.

Why do you think we’ve come to draw such a hard line between the handmade and the industrial?

Over the last 10 years, in this pursuit of creating value in design, the lowest-hanging fruit has been craft. I still use it, and I have always enjoyed it, but I think what that has done is keep craft on a pedestal—where it deserves to be—while industrial textiles have, in many ways, been looked down upon. That narrative binary between the two never sat well with me. Industrial textiles have also been mastered by the human mind, developed for durability and longevity. It’s as important as science, because that’s ultimately how we dress a nation—we can’t do that through craft alone.

You’ve taken the rudimentary Gujarati script found on the hems and borders of industrial fabrics and turned it into objects for the home. Tell us more.

There are two parallel references for me. One comes from craft, where weavers and artisans sign their work by hand, sometimes with nothing more than a single thread. It’s almost like an artist’s signature, and there’s something incredibly beautiful about that gesture of authorship. The second comes from industrial textiles: the Gujarati scripts you find on selvedges, napkins, bedsheets, and other everyday fabrics. Almost every fabric carries some kind of text, yet we rarely think of it as design. They’re familiar rather than spectacular, and because they aren’t part of the conversation with the customer, they almost disappear. What excited me was taking that overlooked language and bringing it into the foreground.

One of the more unexpected pieces in the collection is the Rumaal scarf. What conversation do you hope it creates between the wearer and the observer?

What interested me about the rumaal was this idea of generic design. You can look at 10 blue-bordered rumaals and they might all appear the same, but there are always small differences: a lattice pattern, little dobby marks, variations in the weave. There’s so much variation even within the most generic object.

Turning that into a scarf was really a playful experiment in taking something generic and shifting it just slightly—giving it a bit of quirk and asking you to look at it differently.

Who do you imagine wearing this collection—and what do you hope they do with it?

It’s created for an assortment of people with individual taste—not necessarily great personal style but those who are cognisant of material and the value it brings. This doesn’t mean expensive material; it’s about the act of psychological elevation, where one chooses a bath sheet over a towel. Everyone wears multiple hats today, and Shift is for those from the liberal arts, architects, filmmakers. We favour makers over influencers.